‘Microtonal Restraint’

This article proposes that the beginnings of twentieth-century microtonal music and thinking were shaped more by restraint in composers’ thinking than by a full embrace of the principle of ‘progress for progress’s sake’. Pioneering microtonal composers such as Ferruccio Busoni, Julián Carrillo, John Foulds, Alois Hába, Charles Ives and Richard Stein constitute an international group of breakaway modernists, whose music and writings suggest four tropes characterizing this first-generation microtonal music: the rediscovery of a microtonal past, the preservation of tonality, the refinement of tonality and the exercise of restraint. The article traces these tropes of early twentieth-century microtonal experiment in works by Carrillo, Foulds, Hába, Ives and Stein with reference to writings and music by Busoni, Nikolay Kul′bin, Harry Partch, Karol Szymanowski and Ivan Vyschnegradsky. It adds to the growing scholarship about early twentieth-century tonally based aesthetics and techniques, and broadens perspectives on the history of twentieth-century microtonal music.